This is the price of being #2. Loss of leadership of our own country.
and US has proven unable to build a Mercedes
Mercedes cars also destroy the planet with fossil fuel exhausts.
And yet neither the US or EU could affordably fix a Mercedes
> And yet neither the US or EU could affordably fix a Mercedes
Or an Apple product :))
In reality the EU has curbed the imperial pretensions of aggressive US corporates numerous times - including Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple, and (soon) Facebook.
Yeah, I’m not a billionaire because that much money brings problems. I choose not to be one...but I definitely could be.
Talking about Apple specifically, they haven't released an innovative phone in years, but are still selling their phones for premium prices. They invest huge amounts of money in marketing to influence consumers to buy their products for prestige rather than any cost/benefit analysis. They extract rent in the form of their 30% cut of all iPhone transactions. They have colluded with other giants to keep programmer salaries lower. They are sitting on huge amounts of cash which are prevented from doing useful work in the economy. They can afford complex tax evasion schemes. They operate at a huge profit, which means their shareholders get a disproportionate amount of value compared to their buyers and workers. They have outsized influence on web standards and other commons (they have sometimes used this for good purposes, but there is no reason to allow such power in the hands of an autocratic power).
Note: Apple's competitors are just as bad or worse. My point is that huge corporations are a malady, not that Apple is worse than Google or MS or [...]
What is an innovative phone? The iPhone 12 looks marvellous, runs great, is secure, gets constant updates unlike android and tries to preserve privacy. Apple Pay is awesome, makes me spend more cause of how fluid it is but still is an amazing experience. The software with the hardware makes apple great.
Just what is it with HN and pretending that customers in general care more about functionality than anything else?
Marketing and hype are the main motivators for your average customer. As long as the product isn't utter shit when compared to the alternative, those are far more important for sales than the product itself being good.
America’s strength is taking what other people do, slapping a flag on it for the lucrative US market, and marketing it globally.
And of course, the iPhone 12 is a pretty good phone. So we're the iPhone 11, X, 8, 7, 6 etc. In fact, apart from the camera, they are essentially the same great phone, but people keep buying newer ones, mostly because of marketing reasons (sure they have more powerful processors and more memory, but virtually no one really needs the power of those, since they use their phone to browse the web and get directions).
It's hard to remember now, but Nokia exploded in the consumer market at a time when mobile phones were still niche in the US.
The US was (as always) late to the party, arrived in force, drove everyone else away, then claimed it was their party all along.
Microsoft came along once the company was flailing and demoralized. It was already dying.
How long can you push a shitty product? Not that long I guess.
Nokia had the might to a) build their own great OS, and b) continue to be a market leader. But when you have management making bad decisions, this is all you get. Whether you're in the EU or in the US, doesn't matter.
It is irelevant to the present that Nokia was a big player in the past. The fact that I was a top student in high-scool is irelevant to my current job where I underperform.
Nokia is now a shadow a its former self both in money it brings to the EU economy and in the amount of tech jobs it provides.
That's what's relevant now and there's no pride in this defeat.
So you moved the goal posts by claiming that somehow it dying meant that it never counted.
Nothing is forever, just because the US has been briefly dominant in a field does not make it's approach right, especially as it's pretty obvious to the whole world there's a good chance it's going to become number two soon.
Maybe spending less time on HN will improve your job performance?
Rule of law and happier are debatable.
Productivity seems false if you define productivity as economic output versus just a redefinition of self-rated relaxation on the job.
At a certain point it gets incredibly subjective like which country's citizens are more awesome.
And honestly good on you for being in the EU and liking the EU more. I'm sure a lot of people in the USA feel the same about the USA. The entire point of democracies is that people should change their government to their liking.
Countries in the north have, for example, much higher suicide rates. I’d actually argue people in the south are happier than in the north. Of course, their economies are weaker. But that doesn’t have to translate directly into unhappiness.
Source? This has not been my experience at all in the tech industry.
Are they though? And maybe happiness is overrated?
The first large scale study on overwork deaths says US has less deaths than many countries in Europe.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202...
https://www.npr.org/2021/05/17/997462169/thousands-of-people...
In the U.S., less than 5% of the population is exposed to It's strange how quick people are to condemn monopolies and yet in the same breath insist that starting businesses is not a social good. Of course it's a social good, how do you think competition happens other than by starting businesses?
Does the US have a higher quality of life than Germany, France or the Netherlands?
I agree that innovation is important and societies should promote it, but -imho- not at the cost of consumer & employee protection.
I would argue almost everywhere in the world quality of life is fantastic if you are rich. What is the huge difference between living in a gated community in California to doing it in Thailand?
I have the feeling, and again, I do not live there so I cannot be sure (and can you be even if you live there?) But from books, docus and US friends, the difference is not 1000x even. It is just another world. That is simply not true here.
I guess it is a matter of taste if you can stomach that inequality. I walked (yes, strange EU thing where one uses legs instead of wheels) through some part of Fort Lauderdale and it looked like a bloody war zone. I could not live in a country that permits that. Your have poor here but that is exclusively mentally challenged(or what is the current PC term?) People who get help but always fall back, and very few of them. I recognize the vagrants in my home city from decades ago: still the same people: they have a state provided house and get help but it does not help. You cannot fix that. But rows of addicts turned criminals lining the streets in tents and worse. In the richest country on earth. Rich people should be ashamed that happens on their doorstep. They can and should fix it today.
Your snarky comment is just pretentious cherry-picking. I can walk you through some neighborhoods in France, Sweden and the UK where you'd also wouldn't want to live.
And it is not cherry picking: I know those places too: I do not count the UK as that is another Anglo Saxon country so it seems to copy the US values faster (like Australia where the best city in the world to live apparently, Melbourne, I literally trip over the drug addicts in every street and I go there a lot). And yes, there are places enough I would not want to live but they do not look quite as bad as some things I have seen in the US which were more akin to New Delhi. Maybe I did not travel enough and also not the point; if you are the richest country in the world you simply cannot allow that. In my opinion of course.
Of course, all of that is still very much generalization, and I find comparing quality of life in Europe with US is more or less dick measure contest. You try one when there are no fact based arguments to talk about. NHS versus Medicaid, for example, that's could be a good debate.
On this site most people are wealthy, but I think (not sure but I have nothing else than my visits and documentaries), you are really bad off if you are poor in the US. Here that is not really an issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report#2020_re...
And let's face it - the sort of businesses that HN readers want to start up are rarely that simple. Most people here are dealing with equity, vesting, cliffs, angel investors, VC money, cross-state and international taxation etc. We're not put off by something being a bit harder. Why should other people be?
So, while you're right that there might be fewer businesses, the EU doesn't actually stop people starting if they really want to.
It's also worth pointing out that if someone is falling at the hurdle of just registering and starting a company then the chance of success is very low. There are going to be much harder challenges ahead even where company formation is complicated.
It's also worth noting that some parts of the EU make it a lot easier to start even than the US. Estonia's e-residency programme makes it incredibly easy to register for limited citizenship and start a digital business based there.
The problem though is financing, French investors for example are really stingy and you won’t get somebody to just throw a few millions at you to see if you succeed.
France has decided to build the “French Silicon Valley” multiple times by grouping schools and companies together, providing facilities and so on. But it always fails because there is no VC money pool.
If you start a company here, better think about profitability from the get go.
Which is mostly real-estate
Isn't that...normal? Where did the attitude come from - that startups are somehow entitled to funding worth of several lifetime median incomes, for their half-baked business ideas that are unlikely to ever turn profit? That if the country doesn't shower the founders with angel investor money just for showing up, they are somehow unreasonably risk-averse and stingy.
As an example - Docker, arguably the most influential software of the past decade, was developed in France. HN has derided French investors for not investing in it, leading to the company relocation to US. Afaik, Docker is still burning money, with no end in sight, and will continue to do so indefinitely unless a buyout at ridiculous valuation happens. Looks like...the stingy French investors were right after all...
I definitely think that there is some middle ground to find between not being able to rise money for any project, and being able to get 100M funding for a juicer.
How is this a bad thing? Compare this requirement to, say, Uber, who has been losing billions, and has used investor money to engage in price dumping to corner the market.
However there is a case when you need money to actually do things, e.g.: pay employees, run clinical trials, rent or build up production capacity. If you don't have initial funds then you will be bogged down by doing contract work to hopefully fund your idea one day. It will slow you down and also quite possibly tangle you in support contracts in products you don't actually want to maintain.
My feeling is that the absolute vast majority of tech startups in the US are of the second kind.
> However there is a case when you need money to actually do things, e.g.: pay employees, run clinical trials, rent or build up production capacity. If you don't have initial funds
This has always been the case. Until unlimited US money perverted the incentives to become "waste billions to corner the market by barely legal means" or "wasted billions until someone buys you".
Let's take a look at YC companies, which is representative to the kind of startups we're talking about here. Do you think the majority of them get the funding to burn and subsidize the 10%?
Doordash losses: 204 million in 2018, 667 million in 2019, 461 million in 2020. 1.2 billion dollars in losses over three years. [1]
Cruise: Hard to find any data (the name doesn't help). Raised billions while producing zilch. Was acquired by GM, and is now generating only losses to the tune of 200-300 million dollars per quarter. That is, losses of around 1 billion dollars per year [2]
Instacart: Doesn't publish profitability (suprised Fry face). Had it's first profitable year in 7 years in 2020. In 2019 lost 300 million dollars. Previous data unavailable.
Should I go on?
Even the proftable darlings are usually profitable if you look at them right.
AirBnB: up and down, up and down. Sometimes down with losses up to 674 million dollars a year: [4]
Dropbox: became profitable only last year. Prior to that? Well, losses up to 484 million dollars of losses per year [5]
And so on.
The vast majority is fuelled by litrerally endless investor money with only two modes of operation: corner the market (that is, outlive other competitors who don't have such an unlimited amount of money) or get sold.
[1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/doordash-statistics/
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1077077/gm-cruise-operat...
[3] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/instacart-statistics/
If I were to identify one big flaw, it would be that EU governments don't recognize that small businesses can't do regulatory compliance as much, so they should be exempted. Or you get no small business formation that can turn into large businesses.
The cost/effort of running a tiny deadbeat company in Europe can be very marginal (I run one). That's how all plumbers and carpenters and car mechanics run their businesses: if they can you can too.
Sounds like you could easily justify soviet bureaucracy with that logic.
> It's also worth pointing out that if someone is falling at the hurdle of just registering and starting a company then the chance of success is very low
You're not wrong about this specifically. But why would I open in a difficult country if I can open in an easy country?
Case in point as mentioned elsewhere: we actually have ISP competition here.
However, upload speeds are still a joke in the US - I can’t buy more than 35mbps up, period. That comes with 1gbps down (in reality that’s never stable, so more like 800-900mbps). At previous home I had options of two providers with one offering symmetrical 1gbps fiber - that’s fairly rare in US.
Costs are another issue - US ~$61 per month, OECD average is ~$37: https://www.broadbandsearch.net/blog/internet-costs-compared...
Now this is mostly services innovation, not telecom tech itself, but still has very tangible benefits to consumers and barriers to operating a business.
Well it has produced the top tech companies and (most of the) top research universities in the world. So pretty well.
Not even the tax money of those "top tech companies". Heck, some of those come to us (e.g. Ireland).
As for their products, we can buy them just fine as well.
As a result we have much better mobile plans for example. Every time I see a Ting ad I marvel at how expensive their plans are, and then they compare that to the likes of Verizon…
Kind of like AT&T, Alphabet, Comcast and Disney?
Not to invoke whataboutism, but wealth concentration is as much of an issue in the US, if not more.
No businesses means no wealth to redistribute which means no safety net.
They are literally the bedrock of the entire system. So yes, society should place massive importance on making it easy for them to operate.
2. People with jobs pay taxes. As do the companies themselves.
3. Taxes pay for social safety net?
Sounds credible in theory, but the reality is that despite it being harder in the EU than the US to start a company, the safety net is much stronger in the EU. So there must be something wrong in that theory.
What I claimed is without jobs and companies (economic activity) you cant collect taxes which pay for social safety nets.
Am I wrong? Or is there magic fairy dust to pay for a social safety net I don’t know about?
That implies that making it easier top start a business is a requirement for the safety net; after all, you wrote that funding for the safety net is the reason creating companies should be made easy.
It follows that wherever there is funding for a safety net, businesses are easy to start. So how come that in Europe businesses are -allegedly- so hard to start, but there is a strong social safety net?
TL;DR: Europe is proof that it's possible to have a certain level of regulation to business while still having enough successful businesses to fund a strong social safety net.
I love our continent, for its project, its diversity, and trying to find the right balance between work and social welfare. Life can be more than GDP or market cap.
I stopped my The Economist subscription long time ago, per their constant anti-European bashing.
There are many ways to measure and argue what the author is trying to convey. They choose one that fit their argument.
As a counter point one could look at the writings of authors like Varoufakis for example and see a different world view.
Because imho the article is based on the authors world view. With cherry picked metrics and stats to support.
It isn't empirical but using data to appear as such.
There is much to critique in Europe. But the article sadly fails to tackle the interesting things.
It just opens up the field for an argumentative pissing match EU vs. US (pardon my French).
ps: I also started a company. It was as easy as filling out a form. Even taxes are doable on my own. So nothing too much of a hurdle there.
At this point, US has cumulatively burned a few trillions in funding for their software corporations. Europe, meanwhile, gets the fruits of it, mostly for free (1). Case in point - I personally spent more money last month on a fish tank cleaner than to all Silicon Valley corporations combined, and even that's an aberration in my social circle - most of the others do not wire a single cent there.
Yes, the overall money flow in IT is from EU to US, but expressed as ROI, it's unlikely to be very impressive.
(1) - apart from Microsoft. Imho they're the true crown jewel of the US software sector. Most of the world's economy runs on Microsoft Office in one way or another
That's a bit exaggerated. I'm sure EU businesses rely on Facebook for advertising or on Google/Microsoft/Amazon for software.
Reliable and cheap health care is a huge boon for small entrepreneurs. There’s little regulation to deal with as a software company. Child care and great schools are cheap or free.
Yes firing people is much harder, that is a different context compared to the US you have to properly plan for. Which we do over here.
Overall many countries in Europe are amazing places to start a business in.
Is there really ? I see attempts at copying the US tech scene, but a lot of it seems structured to suck money out of government funds and programs. I see very little private investment. Just recently I talked to a local VC, in a casual chat about how they started their fund I found out they pulled money out of a EU fund, they had to put up like 25% of the money and the rest was just EU grants to stimulate entrepreneurship. Do I need to say that their portfolio looks like a garbage bin of knockoff attempts and small businesses masquerading as startups.
On the other hand, I've seen many EU start-ups with lots of potential, developing things way ahead of the wave. Having ideas and skills is not a problem. Keeping afloat long enough to make them reality is hard.
There is also an important but unspoken cultural factor that really hurts EU initiatives: more-or-less subtle cultural imperialism. No, really, I mean it. As with many things, to succeed in the world of start-ups, you need to be validated by Silicon Valley pundits, to adopt the language of the Silicon Valley, the cultural codes of the Silicon Valley, and ultimately Silicon Valley money etc. That's really hard when you come from a culture that has different definitions of things as basic as "yes", "no" and "please", different definitions of what a good pitch is, different definitions of ethics, of the employer/employee relationship, etc. not to mention the need to live in a foreign language and, to a large extent, in a foreign timezone.
In many cases, the EU start-up bashing I've seen feels like (a reduced form of) poor-bashing, attempting to explain to people who started with fewer chances that everything is their fault.
Now, this doesn't mean that nothing should be done to improve the situation. But I've started to take EU start-up criticism with a pinch of salt.
The comment however was about the EU not being a good place to start a business. Personally I ignore all that stuff you mentioned. We just focus on building a good product. And the EU is a great place for that. I have many acquaintances that have built a multi-million euro business in the last decade.
Italy on the other hand, dose not use the grants, because here nobody have a clue what's the point of a company, what it means to work to build something successful, and if you talk to an Italian about the grind, or working a minimum of 16h a day, they look at you as a complete lunatic - while complaining that they don't have money. Well... Either you grind or you meet every day with your friends for an Aperitivo, and live the Dolce Vita.
If the answer is that you'd need to pay twice as much, then that's the equivalent of saying the person working 16 hours is getting half the going rate as well as not having any life outside work.
It's very easy to forget that there are only 3 countries worth talking about in the EU economically, previously 4, but the UK leaving basically took 20% of the EU's GDP.
Now there's France, Germany and Italy, and everyone else is basically irrelevant, although you might just include Spain or Holland.
As they should.
As others pointed out, CoL is also way lower in most parts were there are relevant jobs to be had.
I am working a job that would pay at least double in SF. I can afford to pay the mortgage on a 130 square meter house with 500+ square meters of garden and relax by growing my own food as a hobby with 40 hours per week, 6 weeks of holiday, paid overtime, really good health care covered by insurance.
I live in one of the four largest cities in Germany. So I benefit from the infrastructure like theater, Medical stuff and so on as well.
And also the ability to start a business on the side with filling out a single form.
And I am able to generate FU money from my main salary, go on trips, give to charity and such.
Reading about insane prices for living in SF or other tech regions puts a damper on the high salaries IMHO.
But I also define my life not by the amount on my pay check.
How is that possible? When I look at typical wages in Germany (50k - 80k Euros) vs cost of houses that size in Germany's four biggest cities (800k to over 1 Million Euros), something does not add up. Either your pay is way above market rates or you got your property way below market rate.
Either way, to me at least, your situation is extremely fortunate but you're an outlier and no developer moving to Germany could replicate it in the current market conditions.
They're made up.
At least job satisfaction doesn't change, I work with startups that interest me and I get to hack on a stimulating open source project. I'm just healthy while I do it.
And the healthcare part what are you even talking about - what employer doesn't provide healthcare in tech ? You'll likely have a good plan an better coverage than NHS (eg. decent dental)
What would an NHS-style plan cost in the US? Like, I'd be happy in a shared hospital room and having lower priority for non-emergency care, but in exchange having 0 co-pay, 0 deductible, 100% coverage for everything (including long-term care), 0 ambulance fees and a maximum prescription cost per item of $12/month?
(Unless you’re in scotland and Wales where it’s just free, because prescriptions are a trivial cost)
I suggest living in the US for a year or two to see if it's the dystopian hellscape you think it is - you can always fly home to the glorious NHS if you stub your toe.
The other aspect I forgot to mention is the way work days are treated. I work 7.5-8 hour days and then I get to hack on my own stuff. I'm sceptical of US attitudes to overtime.
The customary minimum is 2 weeks but most companies offer more and you can negotiate for more.
I'll give you places like Stockholm and Amsterdam don't quite hit those heights, but still have healthy ecosystems going for them. But it's difficult to describe the 'EU' way of doing things because the EU is not a federal government; each country is a separate nation, with far more differentiating them than US states
Do not believe this is correct. In 2016, London was No. 7, after 6 American cities; it was ahead of Beijing and Shanghai individually, though not collectively [1]. The next European city is Paris, in No. 16, after Chicago, Austin and Mumbai.
[1[] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/globa...
I was slightly off, London comes 4th after the Bay Area, Beijing and New York, but handily wins out over Boston, Seattle, or any EU city.
The business and culture of tech startups is just a really mature and highly developed industry in the US. It started in Silicon Valley but these days it is spread across several cities, and there is more domain specialization by city including Silicon Valley.
Claiming “ahh U.K. is different” you might as well say “ahh Bay Area is different”.
London (like Scotland, Liverpool, Manchester) voted massively to stay in the EU. Other gentrified cities like Leeds, Bristol, Oxford, Cambridge also voted to remain.
Where is your evidence that leave was driven by London doing things differently?
Saying “U.K. is different” implies that Finland, Greece and France are relatively similar
What you can do in Germany is the following: "you're fired, please leave in x weeks" (x depends on the employment contract, usually two weeks). Those two weeks are just a matter of dignity. To give both the business and the employer time to part.
Standard terms in employment agreements is three months' notice, although as little as one month may be agreed upon when employment starts. The agreed notice period can only rarely be deviated from without mutual agreement.
A typical annual fee would be ~$200.000 pre-tax for a full-time consulting gig, with 25% VAT paid by the employer on top of that. Contractor pays approximately 50% tax on their fee. It's a bit strange that few companies actually do this, although many will have part of their workforce employed like this indirectly, through a contracting agency. It's popular for roles that have a weak negotiating position, such as teachers, call center employees, nurses etc. Although rarely with contract lengths as short as 3 months.
please explain
Looking at the Netherlands, where I'm from: There are many fast-growing tech companies. Both big and small. Bigger examples are Adyen and Elastic. GitLab started out here.
This is a pretty nice overview, which still misses a lot: https://www.notion.so/Dutch-SaaS-Landscape-89504403a57e43f58...
There are many many tech companies with 10s of millions of revenue that aren't even on this list.
On the other side of the spectrum we have a huge high-tech industry around Eindhoven. ASML is market leader by far in machines to produce chips. The M1 is made possible by them for a large part. NXP is a huge chip company.
I could go on. There is a very diverse landscape here. I'm sure if you look closely you will find a lot in other European countries too.
Spotify is Swedish. As is Klarna and Mojang. SoundCloud is German. Mixcloud British.
Several of the covid vaccines were develeoped in europe (albeit under the umbrella of US companies such as J&J).
Volkwagen and Volvo are beating Tesla in sales numbers and in getting self driving to market hands down.
There is lots of high tech in Europe.
Just Because there are no redicoulous overvalued tech corps, does not mean we aren't creating solid, profitable tech here.
It is also interesting that three key people at BioNTech (founders and an original developer of mRNA medicine) are immigrants. That is an interesting similarity to SV. Soundcloud was also started by two Swedes in Berlin. That one is probably entirely due to the cultural capital of Berlin - from what I hear, Sweden is a good place for software businesses.
Moderna started working at mRNA based approach in the similar timeframe, and get similar results. Also what does it tell you that Moderna can do trial and manufacturing on its own, as opposed to BioNTech who has to rely on Pfizer? Trial was absolutely vital in order to bring the vaccine to the mass that quickly, and Pfizer's role was essential.
Of course Katalin is also Hungarian, so again, it goes to prove that things are complicated than it appears.
It was sold by the american company Ford to the chinese company Geely.
Booking has been owned by a US company since 2005.
As an investor, I'm very reluctant of those typical SV companies who use debt to finance growth. Not for nothing that the investing world is jitterish lately, with an interest-rate increase looming: it's very bad for tech stocks.
I see those as unhealthy or at least very risky (though I have one or two of those in my portfolio: spread)
Spotify is still growing at mad pace; even compared to the COVID/lockdown boom, they are doing well. Spending loads of cash to landgrab the podcast market. Spending loads of cash to move into the audiobook market.
I can understand the grudge some US people feel over a company like Spotify: why not a US-company? Why are they attacking our tech-pride AAPL? Why are they taking hold of our US-media (podcasts) and our entertainment (music)? But Spotify really is what it is: a tech success. Albeit a more typical European one: less debt, slower, more organic growth and less horn-tooting.
(this is not investment advise)
Toyota is not a European company. But it certainly is "the car industry" and it has moved that industry towards EV for years before Tesla produced anything close to significant numbers.
And when it comes to e.g. self-driving, Volvo is far ahead of Tesla too. When it comes to safety and duress Tesla is far from leader too.
I don't like fanboyism and a lot of "Tesla Praise" is driven by mostly this. They make great cars, I presume far above average (which also includes all the low-end cheap cars). But above all Tesla seems to be a great marketing machine, yet when it comes to building cars, they are not up there yet between the BMWs, Volvo or maybe even Toyota, Nissan or Volkswagen.
There are also vast differences between states in the US. If we're comparing I think it's perfectly reasonable to pick places that are on the top end of the scale on both sides of the ocean.
> But even if we only look at NL there are quite a few metrics it falls way short from the U.S: VC raised per capita, exit volume and salaries are all falling short.
I'm not claiming that the EU is equivalent to SV, or the wider US. There is certainly much to love about SV and we can and should do better in a number of areas in which SV is already doing very well.
I'm only correcting the unfounded assumption that some people in this thread expressed that there's somehow nothing going on in the EU. Or that it's a bad place for business, it's really not.
There's a lot to like about the security but I'm starting to wonder if I can ever really break out of working until I'm enfeebled here.
It's a different life model. The EU seems better aligned for enjoying life outside of work. The US seems better aligned for enjoying life as a result of work.
You can't break out of working in the US either, until you save up a lot of money, which requires either a super high paying career, or a ton of sacrifices in terms of quality of life
Im concerned you think functions like Infosec are a drain too (same principles as gdpr - ensure you are handling information securely), please tell me who it is so I don’t invest
Why would I be interested in answering any question you have given your evident distaste for myself, my job, and my industry?
What I said was that GDPR compliance is expensive and uses manpower that US companies don't need to spend like EU companies, which may help to explain the challenges that EU tech companies face when competing with US tech companies. The degree of regulatory compliance EU companies must satisfy might also explain why I'm getting paid peanuts when I could be earning more in the US.
I'm really not sure the total tax load as an employee is much worse compared to California if you factor in state taxes and health care payments.
The US corporate tax code is incomprehensible, healthcare is an expensive and high-risk potentially deadly nightmare, small businesses in tech are permanently at risk from litigation by patent trolls, scam artists, and other white collar thuggery, if you're reliant on a big corporate provider for payments or market access or promotion - and you usually are - they can shut you down without notice on a whim.
But - best of all - I don't need to worry about being murdered by some rando on my way to work.
Good luck being allowed to move to the US unless you're already a high net worth individual or have a high public profile. An EB-x series visa isn't going to get you far unless you're already a household name or you have an unusually in-demand skill. Most startups don't count.
While you can game the system in various ways, or at least try to, the reality is that your immigration status is likely to be precarious for a good long time.
The upside is because of such huge disparities in standard of living, if you can work remotely you can afford to use all private healthcare that's actually decent and affordable by western standards (it's built for medical tourism for western countries).
Anecdote meet anecdote: I had to wait over a year for life altering surgery. My first test after becoming a candidate was over 6 months out.
I'm in the US.
All private.
There are private-sector providers for taking up the slack if you can pay and the public sector drags its feet. The cost generally matches what the treatment costs to produce.
I recently had the choice between paying $3000 to get a novel treatment procedure done in Belgium on short notice, or pay $400 for two private consultations, leading to a referral to the public system with 6 months of waiting to get it done through the public system here. Went for the latter.
It is free! It is for all! Amazing.
I usually ask my friends from the US how much do they like the service at DMV. Usually they hate it.
So you want your healthcare to be run as DMV?
Healthcare is great when you have a choice. The private healthcare industry is booming in Easter Europe now because there are people who can afford it. The state run hospitals are the last thing that are a monopoly, so it remains very badly managed, inefficient and extremely dangerous. I have lost many relatives in such institutions, because of infections due to lack of cleaning or hospital staff ignoring basic things.
I think based on statistics the best option is private healthcare with state sponsored minimum insurance, something similar to the Dutch way.
If you have a life threatening issue you will be seen and treated as well on the NHS as anywhere in the US, EXCEPT it won’t matter if you’re rich or poor, you’ll get the same treatment and it will work out at a literal fraction of the cost to the tax payer - insurance based and tax payer based are basically the same (cost is distributed over everyone contributing) except the government don’t arbitrarily say pay xxx thousand and the stress of “how to pay for this” is removed meaning people can focus on recovery and not on making ends meet.
Anyway. Some of us have been through the NHS a few times. I remember is was kind of ok under the Blair funding, not so great before or after.
That's just wrong. Try actually talking with a UK doctor about their experience instead of blindly following Labour dogma. They don't have the equipment to provide the level of care an American or Swiss hospital can.
It’s not labour dogma it’s a fact that the NHS is excellent and there are numerous international studies that prove that. The pinnacle of medical care in the US is better but only if you can afford it through your insurance or being rich, in the uk it is available for all
The Dutch is also one of the best. Singapore too. You can bring examples pro contra for both types.
I think the regulation that makes a healthcare good or bad, not that it is private or public. Many public healthcares are in Eastern Europe are bad. Some private healthcares are also bad. I still think that a combination of private and public offering is probably the best with regulation being the QA.
My previous comment was to point out that public healthcares can be bad, if it was not clear. Many of my friends do not want to have any nuanced discussion just, public good, private bad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Singapore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_the_Netherlands
Sure, once you get passed the useless home doctor (huisarts).
Sure, if you want to open a capital intensive business like a restaurant, you'll need more money. But that's the same everywhere.
Citations needed as to how they’re significantly worse in Europe than the US. Perhaps they’re simply smart enough not to work hard for someone else’s benefit.
> freedom of movement
The only negative (at least in a strictly US context between the states) is that it forces issues that the Constitution says are the domain of the states into problems that only the Federal government can solve. No city can unilaterally decided to end homelessness with its borders if the homeless from the next state over are free to move in.
> ... the low work ethic .. (I exaggerate, slightly).
is a very wide-sweeping generalization which insults many of us.
Why is it that, every time someone complains about "low work ethics", the underlying context is always "my employees don't want to spend mad hours working on my idea for the compensation I think should be fair for them"?
Work ethics goes both ways BTW, and your "glory to firing someone with less than six months notice" doesn't sit square with me. "firing" is terminating for serious misconduct, notice is not due. I assume you meant laying off for economical reasons. So you want exemplary work ethics from the employees, and then quickly get rid of them when you think you don't need them anymore, did I get that right?
I'm surprised by the low work ethics remark. In my (little) experience I didn't find americans so high on work ethics. It's more like your career is more important to self esteem. This can correlate with being good at work or at posturing.
Granted, this is but one article:
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/10/think-w...
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/b2774f97-en/1/2/1/index....
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-ho...
That literally was what the article was about. Tons of figures/facts in the article.
A couple of comments:
1. Founding the companies was complex I have to admit, and costly. But I would not refrain from founding the next one. It’s just a matter of practice I guess. Still I’d love to have an easier, less expensive way.
2. The EU is a composition of many states, just like the US. People, processes differ a lot.
3. FWIW, filing personal taxes in the States was way more than complicated than over here.
2) The quality of labor you can hire is generally higher in europe (for example its common knowledge that facebook london has better engineers)
I think what the us has is access to venture capital which i agree is difficult in europe.
Europe tends to lose many of its tech talents to the US, but if you pay comparable salaries you'll keep them.
In 2020, the companies in the S&P 500 paid an effective tax rate of 23.77% [1]. On average, it's about 25%.
[1] https://csimarket.com/Industry/industry_Profitability_Ratios...
The real EU problem is on the one hand conservative nature: almost no way to get significant investment here without actually proving you already (before you started!) can pay it back 10x. And then what you rightly say: this is not a union (yet): most countries just don't mesh and the language and culture barriers are somewhat crippling. Not how you say because those barriers do not exist anymore for decades already. Not like the current US yet but things take time: think you had some civil war and such. We are still recovering from border altering world wars and some idiots cutting up this continent like it was a cake after. Let's give half to an idiot Russian dictator and let's not bother to remove Franco. This takes time. Unless you install an actual dictator for the entire thing, this takes time in any place.
Not sure if these will be solved ever but not in my lifetime.
And another cultural thing: I like free time: that you do not probably means something you might want to discuss with someone, but working all hours of the day is something I do not miss and do not wish on anyone.
And as last point: what company do you run or what is your yearly turnover? Because, besides all your ranting, there is the real meat. How is the great US of A working out for your personally with all its blessings? Because I am afraid it will be slightly disappointing after all this. I mean with my 8 weeks a month vacation I have time to write tripe like this, but you...
There is no such thing as a European work ethic. Maybe a Spanish or a German, but even those places are diverse.
For a small seasonal business that’s substantial.
For example if you give a receipt and the customer misplaces it on the way out and can’t find anymore, you’re liable for tax evasion. Never mind that the POS has its own registry they can check. For the authorities, “you didn’t give a receipt, so they can’t tax you.”
When the restaurant was opened about 20 years ago, all sorts of departments came to check it out and suggest whatever ridiculous change.
Food safety in Italy however is probably among the best in the world due to this.
Honest question: is this actually the law, or a tactic of an official seeking a bribe?
German source:
https://www.bundesfinanzministerium.de/Content/DE/FAQ/2020-0...
That law requires shipowners to give a receipt and customers to keep it. Customers can be fined if, a few meters outside the shop, a policeman asks them to show their receipt, and the policeman has evidence they bought something or some service (https://www.accountingbolla.com/blog/sales-tax-in-italy-iva)
Even with the new EU laws regarding receipt, it's surprising how often you are told that you can't pay by card because the machine is broken, or that the waiter "accidentally" hands you the wrong kind of receipt (they hand you an order summary, which was not yet finalized and is not an official invoice, and after you pay they cancel everything so that the payment is not recorded).
There maybe be reasonable explanations.
The EU gets a lot of things right but starting a company here would be playing on hard mode, to say the least.
I'd say we better keep our lifestyles and worldviews and be corporate also-runs, than be slaves also-run-by-corporations like the US.
But the work attitude is usually “lets do something cool”, “lets solve that problem”, “why can’t we be the best?” versus a work mentality of “i don’t think that will work” and “we’ll never get support for that idea” and “i can start on that after the holiday”.
I’m not knocking the lifestyle at all! If work is just a paycheck, then hats off to you. But don’t expect innovation and money to flow. It’ll go elsewhere.
The first is a tiny sliver of people who make good money doing interesting, possibly even fulfiling work. Like say running their own business, or building great new tech.
The larger slice though don't have this. They work long ours doing meaningless boring tasks for long hours and low wages. Think amazon warehouse, and any service level job.
There's a middle ground for qualified trades - like say plumbers - but that's getting eroded.
So when comparing things like leave, ability to fire, heath insurance etc, it's worth understanding that your view in those things is relative to your job.
For the lucky few millionaires, the US is great - it's a very easy place to live if you are rich. But for the rest Europe with lots of vacation time, shorter working hours, free health and education is a lot more appealing.
Or maybe you actually get to work on technology most/all of the time, doesn't mean you enjoy it.
Sure, working in R&D is probably pretty awesome for most tech guys there, but what about the guy maintaining that PHP app from 10 years ago that is "absolutely critical" for that one customer?
My point is you can either give a shit about your job or not. If you don’t, don’t expect to do anything innovative or produce a lot of value. If you’re cool with that, so am I.
Just don’t complain in a few decades when you have to cut back social programs.
You seem to have conflated working overtime and not taking vacations with "giving a shit about your job".
Sure, not giving a shit about your job wont give you innovations. But working overtime and not taking vacations wont give you innovations either. It's totally orthogonal (if not detrimental to healthy worklife and innovation) issue to whether you're passionate about your job or not.
Case in point:
(a) No innovations come out of the hundreds of millions of Americans who work BS jobs, think them as BS jobs, but still being culturally or openly forced to work overtime and to only take meagre vacations. No innovations come from office drones who share all that, and Japan has not made any dent in CS/IT, despite working even more and having worse life balance than Americans. Working overtime is good for production lines, mindlessly churning out stuff.
(b) Innovations come just fine from companies with a healthy work-life balance. Heck, most of the great CS and IT innovations, that in substance and impact no FAANG or BS "unicorn" ever matched, came from places like IBM, Bell Labs and the Xerox Parc, of the 60s and 70s, great places to work, with good work life balance, and research focus -- not toxic overtime environments.
The idea that innovation and liking your job is not compatible with worklife balance or EU-style vacations, is a toxic and dangerous to humanity (ito ndividuals and their families, for starters), idea.
It makes for good profit and docile workforces though. Whatever makes the US employer sleep well at night...
You’re setting up a bunch of straw men then knocking them down.
I did cool stuff at work, but without work, I could do much cooler things.
It has nothing to do with “lets do something cool”, “lets solve that problem”, “why can’t we be the best?”.
That's easy to see, if one considers that it's not just the much fewer employees working on things they consider cool that try to solve interesting problems and be the best that willingly don't go for vacations.
The hundreds of millions of US employees in BS companies, with BS products, who don't like their jobs, and don't think they're building something cool, and so on, also don't get to enjoy any significant vacation time.
Heck, papers pushers, burger flipers, and corporate cubicle drones don't get to enjoy vacations. And it's not because the McDonalds employee "wants to build something cool" while burger-flipping...
It's a distortion to make it about "lets do something cool” US mentality vs "I don't care for my job" European mentality. It's purely the puritan work ethic culture, as established by the religious minded people that dominated early America, plus the rampant release of corporate rule and cut-throat neoliberalism post-80s.
The point is - many (not all) Europeans are happy with a 10 to 4 paper pushing role. Butt in seat, collect a paycheck. That's fine. But you can't have that plus innovation and global leadership in entrepreneurship.
Well, we can consider slavery (or rape, abuse, etc.) a binary thing. That it's just about threatening someone with direct violence and not giving them any other choice.
Or we can consider it a spectrum. Few people work in a corporate job by free choice. People might enjoy work, want to build something great, and so on. But they wouldn't go do it under some idiot middle managers, in some crappy corporation, if they had the monetary freedom.
That's true even for programmers - many would just rather work on their own thing, with their own vision. It's 10x times as true to office drones, burger flippers, and the majority of corporate employees that just do a job for the money, and have absolutely no passion, or great role even, in the final outout.
>The point is - many (not all) Europeans are happy with a 10 to 4 paper pushing role. Butt in seat, collect a paycheck. That's fine. But you can't have that plus innovation and global leadership in entrepreneurship.
Innovation is not about the hours.
Globar leadership isn't about the hours either (it's more about access to a unified market, positioning, places like SV where you can easily mix and match talents and services, synergies, etc). The US has global leading companies that have little to no innovation - they're just fed well. A military and diplomatic pressure that ensures you get favorable deals worldwide also helps.
And the Fed printing money that goes to the rich and ends up as VC spending. The EU might subsidie businesses but is very stingy compared to how the US does it: shamelessly, and through a few layers to make it appear like "private" investing.
And most of it starts from Europe being devastated from WWII, and the US being barely affected. Not from some work ethic change. In the 19th century and early 20th century, Europe was a global leader in innovation, with many of today's fundamental technologies and core research being invented there (from Maxwell to Einstein, and from the car to the computer (Babbage, Zuse).
And I said nothing about overtime. It’s the mentality of “oh I’ll do it tomorrow” and tomorrow never comes.
No country has 8 weeks of vacations. Not even counting statutory + public holidays
> Glory to the LLC. Glory to firing someone with less than six months notice
I don't think even Italy is 6 months. Germany isn't. But way to go generalizing it for the whole EU. (also pop quiz, what do the acronyms GmbH, SARL and OÜ mean?)
> with zero friction movement of labor (this is completely laughable now compared to the US)
Not my experience, but not surprising given the amount of fiction in your post.
Every EU country I've been to has a concept of probation periods - during the first ~3 months, the employer can freely terminate the new employee, or at least choose not to extent his contract. Also, collective dismissals are about equally as difficult in most of the EU than in the US (1)
What is unarguably easier in the US is to capriciously fire an individual on the spot for trivial reasons. I wouldn't call that a feature, though
Yes, the taxes are high, social security is high, but being a programmer makes things much simpler as we are the high earners in this age.
Tax on salaries are quite high, but salaries are significantly lower (especially compared to the level of competence you get - but it varies).
On the other hand we have free health care (with a quality level similar to the top 20-50% level you get in the US is I'm not mistaken) and great support systems should you fail or something happens.
Admin is not obscene and you actually get a lot of help should you need it from the government agencies like the tax authorities.
Then Sweden has a similar level of entrepreneurship per capita as California or the SF region even I believe.
Access to capital do suck compared to the US (based on my limited perspective).
Fear of getting sued for silly shit is unheard of here compared to the US.
TLDR; It varies a lot between countries in the EU. It can be problematic to be overly generalistic in your description. It's for sure different, but I'm not sure everything just sucks compared to the US.
The US is a great hopping off point. As in, its great to start from here and take advantage of any system almost anywhere else in the world.
But I would say a wealthy EU or wealthy Swiss starting point is good too. But I wouldn't incorporate there and especially not have employees.
Both systems work the best for business in intangibles.
Many US states are very incompetent and bureaucratic and slow in business formation as well. Its just that those states are completely ignored for the ones that excel in those products.
All those things make for a stronger top 0.1% at the detriment of the rest of society.
As for free movement of labor inside the EU, it is mostly irrelevant how easy it is because of cultural barriers. People don't want to work in a region where they don't speak the language. See for example how workers in Belgium mostly do not cross the language boundary between north and south, despite having an identical legal regime. Europe's polyglot nature makes it quite literally impossible to match the U.S. or China wrt the movement of labor.
The US also has a program like this, albeit much softer and mostly generational.
India is a massively polyglot nation that has used a program of education and incentives to maintain and grow English.
The fact that Europe has not nominated a cross-EU language and taken action to move toward linguistic unity is actually an outlier. Note that I’m not saying that this would be a good thing but it certainly would have upsides.
I moved here from the US to start a company, and for anyone reading, listen to the above advice. (I'm not a US citizen, so non-trivial to do a startup).
Filing taxes is really straightforward. E.g., for VAT , the administration program that we use spits out quarterly numbers, a submit them through the tax office’s website.
Having started a business twice, both times I was surprised how easy and straightforward it is.
I have to add that the overhead of starting a company probably varies a lot between countries. We once considered opening a company in Germany and it seemed like a lot of paperwork. The problem was not the language barrier — my wife is a native speaker.
Incredible to read this... the top-15 of most productive countries [1] are all European save for the US and Australia, which are populated with a huge population of European descent.
Their French counterparts do the same job in 5 hours instead of 10.
Is it perfect? No. But claims of it being a “living hell hole” are just internet tough talk.
What is more interesting is the bottom quintile and the worst it can get. Because you'll find developped cities and rich neighborhoods with high safety and good healthcare in a lot of places. How bad it's likely to get and how much you have to worry as the average person is the better metric.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202...
https://www.npr.org/2021/05/17/997462169/thousands-of-people...
In the U.S., less than 5% of the population is exposed to long work hours, according to a map the WHO published with the study. That proportion is similar to Brazil and Canada — and much lower than Mexico and in countries across most of Central and South America.
Businesses are fun and all, but in practical terms, they are just sociopaths when compared to what people actually need.
Don't misinterpret this as "and therefore it should be hard to have a business", but the American way is one I'd run away from if it ever tried to apply over here. I run a business and it's fine. Not amazing, not a hockeystick and I'm also not interested in either. It's fine, and that's all it needs to be.
As far as I am aware, healthcare in most EU States is universal and not dependent on employment.
Sure you can get private healthcare through employment, but the state systems is there for everyone if they need it.
But there’s easy schemes to retain cover like EHIC. https://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=559
Only 4% of US bankruptcies are because of medical bills <https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2018/0...>. A tipoff that [insert large percentage here] of bankruptcies aren't actually because of medical costs is that only 6% of bankruptcies by those without health insurance are because of that cause. The biggest cause of bankruptcies is lack of income, which health insurance doesn't affect.
Maybe that 4% is correct, but for sure how to deal with paying for medical care is a big worry for many people in the US.
There was a post a few days ago (or comments at least) discussing how many people working low wage jobs in the US are working 29 hours or fewer specifically so their employer doesn't need to provide health insurance. Are there social programs that cover those people, or do they just not go to the doctor when sick?
My general experience when not going in to deal with a discrete injury is that I pay 50 bucks to have someone ask me some questions, shrug, and give me the card to someone else who would cost another 50 bucks that I can no longer spare.
Details vary by state, but generally Medicaid, a public insurance program, kicks in for those below a certain income level.
Contrary to what Reddit would have you believe, 91% of Americans have medical insurance (<https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2020/demo/p60-27...>), whether through their employers, or government programs like Medicare/Medicaid. That's compared to 95-97% in other developed countries because there are always some people who fall through cracks, like (say) a Canadian who doesn't get a new provincial health care card after moving, or a German who neglects to buy into a new sickness fund after changing careers.
Two thirds of Americans have private medical insurance. One third have public insurance of some type, including 20% from the aforementioned Medicaid.
Some large chunk of the 4-6% differential in the US versus other countries is illegal aliens who don't qualify for public insurance and are working cash jobs that don't provide private insurance. The only such national systems with actual 100% (or as close to it as possible) coverage is something like the UK NHS, which does not have a requirement to show a membership card (because, well, there isn't one) to receive treatment.
Here is a different take from a newer paper.
> The majority (58.5%) “very much” or “somewhat” agreed that medical expenses contributed, and 44.3% cited illness-related work loss; 66.5% cited at least one of these two medical contributors—equivalent to about 530 000 medical bankruptcies annually.
Really though it suggests the US has both a medical bankruptcy problem as well as a missing safety net problem. I know I’m seriously thinking about leaving to avoid a likely major medical event killing my net worth in later life.
This paper is by Himmelstein and Woolhandler, the same authors who wrote the earlier one that the authors the Post piece cites was responding to. As the Post piece says:
>So Carlos Dobkin, Amy Finkelstein, Raymond Kluender and Matthew J. Notowidigdo did what’s called an “event study.” Instead of looking at bankruptcies to see how many involved medical bills, they started with the illness, and asked how much more likely people were to declare bankruptcy after they got sick. That’s a much better way to tease out causation than asking whether someone who just went through a financially ruinous divorce also owed his or her dermatologist thousands of dollars.
In other words, it's not surprising that someone who declares bankruptcy owes medical bills among all the bills he is behind on. While "correlation is not causation" is used far too often by people who don't really understand its meaning, this is an example. Again, from the Post piece:
>That jibes with what we’ve seen in the bankruptcy data since Obamacare passed. If medical bills really were driving so many people into bankruptcy, then we would have expected filings to plummet after 2013, when millions of people gained health insurance coverage. Instead we see a smooth decline from the recession-era peak.
Starting is hard enough without the general negative attitudes, the government insanities, the insane taxes, the low work ethic, the 8 weeks of vacation every month (I exaggerate, slightly). And I was in one of the two best EU countries, God only knows how bad it is in Spain or Italy or whatever where opening for business more than one day a week is seen as aggressive. (again, I exaggerate slightly).
If anyone disagrees with this article who's in the US, I dare you to go and try and start something in the EU and report back. Not the UK, the EU.
Glory to the US, and the ability to move States with little friction. Glory to the LLC. Glory to firing someone with less than six months notice (I'm looking at you, Belgium). Glory to sales tax below 20%. Glory to the country I chose as home, which so many natives seem to be delusional about how terrible it is.
One day I hope the EU lives up to the dream of being a genuine federation of EU states, with zero friction movement of labor (this is completely laughable now compared to the US), defends its borders instead of giving up on them, allows free and fair competition and puts its citizens above the bizarre EU commission and its bonkers methods and plans.